watched for the moment the girls would arrive, the way the group of boys at the overlook would change when they did. I already knew at this point that I was gay, and so I was forever looking for other signs of it in the landscape. What I was looking for was what seemed to vanish then. (Location 106)
But on seeing the girls’ cars, they lifted off each other, as if what was there was not there. (Location 115)
Note: As if what was there was not there L
My interest, I can see now, was in whether I could know the answers without asking questions regarding my own insecurities. (Location 456)
You, sitting here, paralyzed by fear, alone in your apartment, reading cards. (Location 467)
What can you trust of what you can’t see? (Location 563)
The writer Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day “the consolations of the mask,” where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn’t know this then. (Location 609)
I mean, just what exactly is going on inside your piece? (Location 687)
Don’t worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing it makes it possible. (Location 692)
You might think that your voice as a writer would emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you’d be wrong. What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case most especially, amnesiac. And that it has to be cut free. (Location 708)
it’s habits of mind and habits of work. (Location 728)
“In the long run, we only ever hit what we aim at.” (Location 745)
